I like watching people eat. Not in a voyeuristic kind of way. I don’t get off on watching someone slurp oysters or gnaw and suck on a piece of caña. I like watching the movement of someone’s mouth as it opens and shuts, as they pierce food with their teeth. Mouths are like a writer’s voice. Each is amusing in its own way.

I like the way my cousin’s husband holds his spoon when he eats. He holds it like a toddler learning fine motor skills, his hand wrapping around the cheap metal as if he were clenching a fistful of dirt. This, I imagine, is the way he holds his wife, my cousin, tightly, savagely, with all the virility of the world.

Sometimes seeing my cousin’s husband eat reminds me of the man from the Chinese food restaurant. At first I thought it was the similarity in the pointiness of their elf-like ears that caused me to connect the two. But then I recalled the way the man from the Chinese food restaurant held his plastic fork—identical.

Once at a Chinese food restaurant a couple of blocks from my home I surreptitiously watched a man eat from a plate that had chow mein, fried rice, and orange chicken. Though I didn’t, I wanted to stare. I took brief, sneaky glances. When he picked up his phone, sitting next to his plate of food, and started typing, I watched him chomp down on his food. Every time he bit down on the orange chicken a large blueish-green vein on the left side of his neck bulged out, a result of chewy orange chicken that had been left out for too long. I remember wanting to caress his vein. 

I never forget the way someone eats, Kitty. I have a photographic memory when it comes to things like that. If she commented on my claim of having a photographic memory, my mom would say something like “cuando te conviene,” which in English translates, almost exactly, to “when it’s convenient.” In other words, I remember the things I want, the things I make an effort to remember because they benefit me in some way or another. She wouldn’t be wrong. I remember the way people eat because it brings me pleasure. Not the sexual kind. It’s more like platonic love. Call it platonic pleasure.